Architecture and new media converge in artistic duo Naziha Mestaoui and Yacine Aït Kaci’s ’3minutes²’ interactive intervention on Jakob+MacFarlane’s Les Turbulences building for the FRAC Centre in Orleans, France.

In 2006, Electronic Shadow (Mestaoui and Kaci) teamed up with architecture firm Jakob + MacFarlane, in the context of an invitation for tender on the project for the new FRAC Centre building in Orléans, and won the competition. Called Résonances, this work specifically designed for the building opened in September 2013, and “was in fact conceived like a bright graft introducing a principle of interaction with the urban environment, based on climatic data, as well as image scenarios designed by the duo. This interactive veil of light comprises hundreds of LEDs and functions when activated through light images that at the same time resonate with the characteristic architecture.”

3 minutes² interactive intervention by Electronic Shadow

“In 2003, Electronic Shadow developed a technological process at the origin of what is known today as 3D mapping.” says Electronic Shadow. “The 3minutes² installation supports the creation of a media that combines space and images in an interactive relationship conditioned by the user – a performer – evolving in this setting. Their movements generate a work of fiction that influences the projected visual environment, at the same time requiring the body as an interface between the real and the virtual.”

3 minutes² interactive intervention by Electronic Shadow

“By merging the space, image and network, we construct what we call hybrid realities” explains Mestaoui and Kaci.